Folk tales

“If you go back, the key stories we told ourselves were stories that were important to everyone and belonged to everyone,” said Henry Jenkins, director of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”

I had not read this 1997 explanation of fan fiction from the New York Times before, but that’s a pretty choice quote, right there. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but of course folk tales have exactly the same problem under our current copyright regime that folk music has. But with fan fiction, the authors tend to have an understanding that what they’re doing is in a legal grey area at best. I haven’t seen that kind of awareness from musicians much.